Cartoon for January 31, 2009

Radical problems call for radical solutions. Sadly, Obama is obsessed with the centrists who've gotten everything wrong every single time.

Cartoon for January 29, 2009

Obama likes to read up on the Civil War. Compared to Bush, it's nice to see someone who likes to read. Based on his cluelessness about Afghanistan, however, he needs to expand his reading list.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hopelessness You Can Believe In

Why Obama is Scarier Than George W. Bush

Dave Eggers preceded his memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" with a section titled "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book." It's a brilliant attempt to disarm the reader and preempt criticism. Among its warnings, referring to chapter four: "The book thereafter is kind of uneven." (Disclosure: Eggers edited my work at two magazines in the '90s.)

Barack Obama shares Eggers' talent for managing expectations. "There will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations and disappointments,” Obama said upon his arrival in Washington. “I will make some mistakes." In other words, don't expect much.

The soaring optimistic rhetoric of the campaign ("yes we can") is no more, replaced by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo-Yo Ma. So is Obama's million-dollar smile. The Dour One is demanding patience. And he's getting it, for now: "Most respondents [to the New York Times/CBS News poll taken January 19th] said they thought it would take Mr. Obama two years or more to deliver on campaign promises to improve the economy, expand health care coverage and end the war in Iraq."

Setting the bar low seems to be working. Seventy-nine percent of Americans say they're optimistic about the next four years under Obama.

Sad, pathetic Americans! Like a dog that's been beaten eight long years, they're so psyched about the fact that their new master doesn't drool and speaks coherent English that they'll follow him anywhere. The media is in love with The One and so, therefore, is the public. No one questions him.

Frightening but true: Barack Obama is even more dangerous to liberal ideals than George W. Bush. Obama, who didn't appoint a single liberal to a senior position, has neutered the left. "Protesters, a fixture of every inauguration since President Nixon’s in 1973, were few and scattered on Tuesday as Barack Obama assumed the presidency," reported the Times.

The antiwar types have thrown away their signs. The sight of the first black president has the fair weather pacifists goo-goo-ga-gaing over a man who plans to transfer U.S. occupation troops and the carnage they bring from Iraq to Afghanistan.

No demonstrators in the streets. No reporters asking tough questions. A political honeymoon based on nothing. Didn't we learn anything from 9/11, when 90 percent of Americans, and the media, and Congress, issued George W. Bush a similar blank check?

People think things will be better four years from now, but there's little reason for hope. America faces radical problems. Radical problems require radical solutions. Unfortunately, Obama's proposals, and the moderates and conservatives with whom he has filled his cabinet, are woefully inadequate to the challenges at hand.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calculates that there's at least a $2.1 trillion hole in the economy--an "output gap" between production capacity and consumers' ability to buy goods. Filling that hole would require direct investment (like Obama's public works proposal) of at least $1.5 trillion. But Obama's plan only contains $355 billion, of which only $136 billion would be spent within the next two years. It's better than nothing, but not by much. Obama wants to plug a gushing artery with a Band-Aid one- tenth the size of the wound.

It's churlish to predict that Obama's approach won't work. But even Obama admits it won't. He promises to create 4 million new jobs by 2011. But we're currently losing 4 million jobs every five months. If Obama delivers, 25 million Americans will have lost their jobs by 2011. (The math differential is due to the fact that population growth increases the workforce by 2.8 million jobs annually.) With unemployment figures like that, no one will doubt that we're in a real Depression: breadlines, suicides, the whole bit.

Obama's order to close Guantánamo and the CIA's secret "black site" torture prisons within a year is heartening. But as with his other initiatives, it doesn't go far enough. The detainees should have been freed, paid a generous compensation package, and received a formal apology by the U.S. government on Day One of his Administration. Gitmo should have been shuttered immediately. All the torture criminals from Bush to the U.S. Navy guards should have been thrown in prison and put on trial.

Instead, Obama's goons (they're his now) will keep torturing the detainees for at least another year. Some detainees may still be subjected to kangaroo courts. And Obama's executive orders contain weasel words that let him take back America's renewed commitment to constitutional rights with the snap of a finger. The orders, reports the Times, "could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured."

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration creeps who personally ordered the murder and torture of innocents kidnapped by the military, including young children, will not face prosecution.

During the campaign, Obama promised there would be "no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens." He has since changed his mind. Obama will keep the USA-Patriot Act. Habeas corpus, eliminated by the Military Commissions Act, won't come back.

The biggest reason hope doesn't stand a chance is Afghanistan, where Obama plans to send the soldiers he wants to pull out of Iraq. The international community, which understands that the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had no more to do with 9/11 than the war against Iraq, will not take kindly to this escalation. Moreover, the war against Afghanistan is even less winnable than Iraq. At a time when we can least afford foreign adventurism, Obama plans to pour billions of dollars and thousands of lives into an Afghan charnel house with no prospect of victory.

Bush faced energetic opposition. Obama, on the other hand, is adored by the very people who should be shouting at him the loudest. Conservatives lost their credibility by supporting Bush, leaving Republican voices out in the cold.

Give the man a chance? Not me. I've sized up him, his advisors and their plans, and already found them sorely wanting. It won't take long, as Obama's failures prove the foolishness of Americans' blind trust in him. Obama isn't our FDR. He's our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable during unreasonable times.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for January 26, 2009

America's radical problems require radical solutions. Obama's centrism yields half-assed sops instead.

Cartoon for January 24, 2009

The New York Times is selling display ads on its front page, whoring out the Old Grey Lady. What next?

By Order of the Department

posted by Susan Stark





This sign was posted in DC a few days before the inauguration. Consider that two million people showed up for the festivities. That's a lot of customers for the ladies. But hey, your tax dollars at work to print and post that sign.

http://dcist.com/2009/01/dc_tries_to_ban_prostitution_for_in.php

Cartoon for January 22, 2009

So much for change you can believe in: the torture continues at Gitmo and will continue at least another year. And nary a word about the NSA's despicable warrantless wiretapping and espionage program against American citizens.

A Most Interesting Coincidence

The following is from Obama's Inaugural Address:

Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.

From my column for January 1, 2009:

The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value.

Thanks to several sharp-eared Friends of Rall for noticing.

Archive Update

We're getting there. Everything is now in the archives except 1995, 1996 and 1997. I just posted 1998, 1999, and 2000. There are a few other years that are not yet keyword searchable, but they're there to see. I'm kind of amazed at looking at all this stuff so many years later. It's so different yet so similar at the same time. Anyway, check it out if you have the chance.

TED RALL COLUMN: That's It?

If Bushies Escape Justice, What's Left of the U.S.?

That's it? Bush moves back to Texas to dote on his presidential library—while drawing a $197,000 pension? Cheney goes back to Wyoming to fish and work on his memoirs? After committing crimes so numerous and monstrous that bookshelves are already groaning under their weight, the cabal of illegitimate coup leaders who destroyed the U.S. get to tiptoe out of the rubble and go home to a comfortable retirement?

Earlier this week a senior Pentagon prosecutor openly admitted what has long been known: torture, the lowest and most criminal act any society can sanction, is official U.S. policy. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture," Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington Post about the alleged "20th hijacker" on 9/11, now being held at Gitmo. The man was so brutalized, Crawford decided, that he could not be charged in court. The same is true of many of those being held at the Guantánamo concentration camp.

None of the Bush Administration officials responsible has faced the slightest inconvenience as the result of his actions.

Donald Rumsfeld, the beast who promoted, botched and joked about a war that has killed more than a million innocent Iraqis, spent the last year as a "distinguished visiting fellow" at Stanford, cogitating about "issues pertaining to ideology and terror."

John Yoo, the Justice Department hack who wrote the memos that authorized U.S. military and intelligence personnel to torture prisoners of war, is enjoying the cozy ambiance of academe as a UC Berkeley law professor.

Colin Powell, whose 2003 lie to the U.N. ("there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more") convinced Americans who were still on the fence to support the invasion of Iraq—a misbegotten project that drove the last nail in the coffin of the U.S. economy—wiles away his days attending the meetings of various corporate boards.

If you were expecting Barack Obama to deliver justice, forget it. "I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards," Obama said recently. "Look forward" is Beltwayese for "no accountability."

Obama went on to assure the men and women who tortured innocent detainees to death that no one will ever bother them about their war crimes. "And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up."

Is this what we've come to? Have Americans become so morally depraved that we condone this level of lawlessness? Have we become so weak and helpless in the face of unconscionable violations of the Bill of Rights—torture, government spies listening to our phone calls, starting wars against countries that never hurt us, looting the treasury—that we just "look forward"?

So much for the land of the free and the brave. See you around, nation of laws.

The meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, historians say, brought down the Soviet government by exposing its incompetence and powerlessness. Poor design and disaster response turned the accident into a disaster. The regime's inability to contain the problem and successfully cover it up highlighted its impotence.

"The Chernobyl catastrophe," wrote Philip Taubman in The New York Times in 1996, "was a manifestation of the political, moral and technological rot that was metastasizing in the Soviet system and would soon kill it." People stopped believing in the USSR. Then they stopped fearing it.

Should the United States collapse, historians will likely point to two events: 9/11 and Katrina. 9/11 proved the U.S. was a paper tiger, an aggressive power that can blow up the world with nuclear weapons yet can't scramble a single fighter jet to stop 19 idiots with boxcutters. The inept response to the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans was incompetence personified. The American people don't think the U.S. government cares about them. Even worse, they doubt the government could help them if it wanted to.

With the American government exposed as stupid and weak, all that remains is the American ideal: the 232-year-old democratic experiment that began with the idea that we are all equal under the law and that all human beings enjoy a set of inherent, inalienable rights—even "enemy combatants" and illegal immigrants.

If we fail to hold the elites who seized the presidency in a 2000 judicial coup d'état to account, if we say torture is no big deal, if we don't imprison men who lied and conspired to murder more than one million Iraqis and Afghans and Americans and countless others, if we let these individuals golf and fish and deliver lectures to young people as if they have done nothing wrong, then such horrors will happen again and again. I want would-be torturers to "look over their shoulders." I want them to second-guess themselves.

Even worse than that: If we don't prosecute Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and Yoo and Rice and Powell and scores of other top Bush officials who took part in the destruction of fundamental American values, there will be nothing—not even an idea—left of the United States.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Unimpressed in Advance

Like all sane people, I am relieved that that worthless shit-for-brains is leaving office tomorrow. It wasn't always certain, you know. After he all, he did steal the presidency in the first place.

But I am not likely to be thrilled by Obama, either. Tomorrow, we will no doubt hear an excellent speech, maybe even a great one. We will also read about some presidential executive orders, including one to close Gitmo, that will give cause for optimism to many Americans.

But it shouldn't.

Pretty words are nice, but the facts belie them. Every indication is that Obama is a DINO--Democrat in name only. His cabinet, which doesn't contain a single liberal, makes centrist Bill Clinton look like a Marxist in comparison. Conservatives and centrists are not going to be able to deliver the radical solutions needed to solve our many radical problems.

Obama's economic program only promises to create 4 million jobs by 2011--when we will have lost about 29 million at current projections. By 2011, if Obama gets his way, we will be in a deep, deep Depression. We will be lucky if the country still exists in its present form if that happens.

The Gitmo closing is nice, but Obama doesn't plan to prosecute those who ordered the torture and other war crimes that occurred there. Moreover, he doesn't plan to release all the inmates. Gitmo could stay open another year or more. The CIA secret prisons could stay open. CIA torturers won't be prosecuted. Neither will Bush and Cheney, who ordered it personally.

You get the idea.

Pretty words. Not much meat.

Don't be taken in. Take it out--to the streets. Now, more than ever, is the time for intelligent Americans to speak out and be heard.

Dear President Obama: You Have A Choice

by Susan Stark

This is a sincere and heartfelt open letter to you, Mr. Obama. A letter addressed to a man who is quite obviously a deep thinker, and with an incredibly focused and disciplined will. And someone who I wouldn't bother with if I didn't think that he had the ability to change things for the better and save an entire country.

Since you won the election on November 4th, there have many people in the media and otherwise, telling you what to do in your first weeks of office. I could tell you what to do as well, like any other of the millions of bloggers and columnists and other media figures in the world, but would it do me any good?

In Buddhism, there is a teaching that the mind is the greatest of inhibitors to enlightenment, mainly because of the illusions and deceptions that the mind allows itself to entertain. I am certainly no Buddhist master, but I can certainly see the wisdom in that.

Being that I'm not in your physical presence on a regular basis, I can only base my evaluation of you by your actions (and really, is there no better barometer to judge a person?). And based upon your actions so far, I can conclude that you are under the snare of an incredibly powerful illusion. And that is:

You believe that this country, the United States of America, can continue as it has been; that it can continue along the course it has been taking. That it can take and take and take, without giving anything in return. That it can ignore the ordinary people of the world as if they were so much rubbish--that they are just pawns on a chessboard. That is a delusion. A deception. An illusion. And I think that somewhere along the line, the young community activist that still exists in you knows that I'm right.

And since that idealistic community organizer still exists in you, the one that truly wants to make difference, I am going to give you my own advice, and it is not the advice those talking heads and blow-hards on cable TV, and those financially failing newspapers, are giving you.

This is what you need to realize:

NUMBER ONE.

Imperialism Is Dead. The days when this country could do anything it wanted to do, when it wanted to do it, are OVER WITH. Finished. Caput. Dead. We can't afford it anymore. We are in debt up to our hairline. You need to realize this before you realize anything else. We are not an Empire any more. We have lost Latin America. We have lost Russia. And we never had China to begin with. And we are losing Africa to China. And what's more, we've lost the Middle East, even though it doesn't look like it. We've lost it, and we need to withdraw our troops from the area. It costs more money to maintain troops over there than the value of the oil in the ground that we're “protecting”. The United States can still be a force in the world, but not as an Empire. It's over with, Mr. Obama, and that's that. All of this means that we need stop pretending that Hugo Chavez is our enemy, and that we need to stop the proxy oil wars with Russia and China. Which leads me to

NUMBER TWO.

We need to wean ourselves off of oil and gas, as much as humanly possible. That means trains. We have millions of miles of train tracks that are not currently being used as passenger transport. They need to be turned over to that use. We need buses. We need trains. We need hybrid vehicles. We need trains. We need hydrogen fuel. We need trains. We need solar and electric. We need trains. And we can get people back to work again setting up these post-petroleum infrastructures.

NUMBER THREE.

You have emphasized jobs in rebuilding infrastructure. I agree. But that is not enough to get this country back into shape again. We need to start MAKING THINGS AGAIN. During the 80's and 90's and 00's, there was massive job loss in the manufacturing sector, because companies could take their factories elsewhere for cheaper labor. This trend must be reversed, or we will not recover economically. And, we must hire US Citizens in this endeavor; they cannot be foreigners on work visas (no more cheating on this, Mr. Obama). And any factory owner who shuts down his or her plant from now on will have their property confiscated and the workers put back to work in the same plant. No more layoffs in manufacturing. And, we need not go back to the days when manufacturing was a big, polluting mess. We can provide incentives for environmental controls. And there's nothing like building train cars, buses, hybrid vehicles, solar panels, and more recycling plants to get this country moving in the right direction. Lastly, we can also set up cottage industries like soap-making and pottery, etc.

So what are you going to do, President Obama? If you refuse to take my advice, then the ordinary people of the country might decide to take matters into their own hands and do what needs to be done themselves. The choice is yours.

Cartoon for January 19, 2009

My feelings about Bush's politics are well-documented. As a political cartoonist, however, a subject like that only comes along once in a lifetime.

Cartoon for January 17, 2009

No one fears for the future of our once-great, now collapsing, country more than me. But if everything falls apart, Americans certainly won't be able to claim it came out of nowhere.

Cartoon for January 15, 2009

Bush—er, Obama—can't come up with $1 trillion to fill what Paul Krugman describes as a nearly $3 trillion hole. Yet he, and no one else, ever questions the wisdom of escalating our other doomed war, the one against the people of Afghanistan.

Archive Update

The key year of 2002 just went live. That includes "terror widows" and other post-9/11 treats. The archives go back to 1991. I still need to add 1995-2001, keyword tag 2004 and 2005, and replace pixelated JPEGs with clean versions.

Cartoonists Misderemember Bush

The Washington Post has a piece quoting cartoonists about what they'll miss most about the Bush years--not as people, but as cartoonists.

And here I was thinking cartoonists were people.

Third-Hand Smoke Cartoon Comes to Life Ten Years Later

Ten years ago (sorry, it's not in the archives yet, though I recently added 1994 and 2002), I did a cartoon about "third-hand smoke." Now, it seems my silly idea is coming to life.

Coincidence? You Be the Judge

Last week's Ted Rall column suggested that we follow Willie Sutton, and go where the money is by soaking the rich:

If broke consumers are the problem, shoveling money into their pockets is the way to get them spending again. Where do get it? The reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, he supposedly said, was because "that's where the money is." These days, the money is the hands of corporations and rich individuals.

Today's New York Times has a column by staff columnist Bob Herbert entitled, of all things, "Where The Money Is":

At some point, however, someone is going to have to talk about raising revenue. The dreaded T-word is going to come up: taxes. Well, there’s a good idea floating around that takes its cue from the legendary Willie Sutton. Why not go where the money is?

"Floating around." Such an interesting way to put it.

Speaking of coincidences, Herbert goes on to suggest a stock transaction tax as the solution for raising money. That's an idea that I've been promoting since 2004, when I published it in my book "Wake Up! You're Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right."

On the one hand, it could just be that two people independently came up with the same analogy at the same time. It happens. Or it could be that a writer who reads a lot of syndicated columns might have misremembered that what he thought was "his" idea really wasn't. Not such a big deal, really, but kind of annoying considering that the "liberal" Times refuses to employ even one true leftie on its editorial staff. Considering that we lefties have been right about just about everything, and the moderates and conservatives wrong about just about everything, well...you know. It's kind of annoying.

So what do you think? Coincidence? Or not?

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Oprah's Book Snub

How Winfrey Elevates Lowbrow Tastes and Hurts Reading

Oprah's Book Club, The New York Times wrote when the talk show queen revived it in 2005, is "a boon to authors and publishers."

OBC has certainly been good for authors who lie and the greedy publishers who put out their books. Oprah's first post-hiatus pick was James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," a memoir of substance abuse and rehab whose muscular Hemingway-lite style screamed inauthenticity. It also contained numerous fabrications.

Oprah wasn't alone; Frey's lies fooled many stalwarts in America's state-controlled media. "As Frey takes pains to make clear, he was a particularly hard case--an omnivorous drinker, crack smoker and occasional drug dealer who was wanted in three states on outstanding charges," wrote a Times reviewer who recommended the book. Neither Oprah's staff nor the Times bothered to check whether criminal records verified his "harrowing" account. (They didn't.)

Thanks to its placement on Oprah's Book Club "Pieces" spent 15 weeks as a number one bestseller and generated at least $2.3 million in sales. When Oprah invited Frey back on the show to dress him down for lying, people winced at Frey's humiliation. I hope he thanked her; it generated more sales.

Oprah narrowly dodged a bullet with another of her picks, the maudlin 1997 Holocaust memoir "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years," by Misha Defonseca. This purported tale of a young Jewish girl who travels through Europe in search of her parents before being adopted by a pack of wolves, à la Romulus and Remus (!), turned out to be less than authentic. Quelle surprise. For one thing, "Misha"'s real name was Monique de Wael. For another, she was Catholic, not Jewish. And she never left home. As for the wolves...well, you can guess how truthful that part was. In March 2008 Defonseca (née de Wael) admitted "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving."
Fortunately for Oprah, the truth came out before the show she taped urging her audience to buy "Misha" was released.

"The single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air," Oprah called a Holocaust-era romance (notice a trend?) between Herman Rosenblat and his wife Roma. The couple's 1996 appearance on her show scored them deals for two books--leading to Oprah's latest embarrassment. Herman's story that his future wife had saved his life by tossing apples over a fence at Buchenwald were belied by historical accounts of the camp's layout.

Before the truth caught up with them, the Rosenblats' Oprah imprimatur also secured them a $25 million movie deal. The film is in production at this writing.
Oprah claims she was duped by greedy, lazy publishers. Yet her website still recommends the fake books by Frey and the Rosenblats. Even so, the problem isn't Oprah's credulousness. It's that she has atrocious taste. That, and a platform for promoting her bad taste.

Books picked by Oprah's Book Club sell in the millions. Once such title was Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel "The Road," a plodding and vacuous depiction of phony connectivity between father and son after something terrible--we never learn what--has happened. ("The Man" and "The Boy," he calls them. This passes for clever.) Like many of Oprah's picks, and like many of the titles promoted such influential mainstream venues as The New York Times Book Review, it's a book written in the form of a good book--spare prose, brooding tone, and who doesn't love a good post-whatever societal meltdown tale?--that is not actually good.

An excerpt:

"Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we're still going south.
Yes.
So we'll be warm.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?"

Sure, it's okay. But only if you blow your brains out first. This tendentious crap won the friggin' Pulitzer friggin' Prize. It's going to be a movie. McCarthy is gonna make millions. And he sucks.

To which one might ask: So what?


Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin weighed in when the Frey scandal broke. "Whatever [Frey's] intent, 'A Million Little Pieces' clearly moved many readers—Oprah included—or it wouldn't have been as successful as it was," he wrote. "Why did it elicit such an emotional response, and is that response rendered invalid if its source is revealed to be a lie?"

Yes. It is. Of course. Because the readers were fools to have fallen for such tripe in the first place. First of all, because it was obviously untrue and second, because the writing was so bad. The problem isn't bad and dishonest writers. They can't help themselves. The problem is that mainstream American culture is gullible, sentimental, and dumb.

No is more blameworthy for Americans' stupidity than publishers and book reviewers who act as taste-makers. As in all creative pursuits, publishing exposure is a zero-sum game. Rising tides don't lift all boats; anyway, they're more like thrones than tides. A few titles suck the air out of the room as the rest wither and die due to lack of attention.

Each decision to review a bad book results in a better book going unreviewed, unnoticed, and its author unremunerated--and thus less likely to keep publishing. Each prize committee's decision to grant an award to a bad book takes away praise that might otherwise have drawn acclaim and sales to a good one. When bad books do well, authors study what works in the marketplace and copy the formula--resulting in more bad books.

Readers who rely on popular hype to choose books often come away disappointed. A few may decide to deep deeper, but most won't. Burned readers become non-readers.
A few years ago, I read Robert Fisk's magesterial "The Great War for Civilisation--The Conquest of the Middle East," in which the legendary war correspondent used a "Pulp Fiction"-like wrap-around structure to tie together personal and sweeping historical narratives of the West's 20th century relationship with the Middle East to staggering effect. It's a 1136-page monster, yet I savored every sentence.

Everyone I know who has read it came away with the same impression. Yet "The Great War" never made the bestsellers list. It languishes at #43,498 on Amazon, the victim of book reviewers and media mavens who chose to ignore it in favor of dull, sentimental crap, some of which isn't even true. In case you were wondering, "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World" is #2 on The New York Times bestsellers list (non-fiction category, natch).

Imagine what the book world would look like if books like Fisk's tome or my current favorite, George C. Herring's monumental "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776," were an Oprah's Book Club pick. Of course, that will never happen. Which is why, if Oprah truly cares about books, she'll stop trusting herself and her tastes, and shut down her stupid book club.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for January 12, 2009

I'd like to be wrong about this. I really do. Just like I wanted to be wrong about Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Obama. But I doubt it.

Cartoon for January 10, 2009

There's no reason to be hopeful. Obama's economic program is too little, too late. His cabinet is too moderate, too in-the-box to understand that he may well end up being the last president of the United States. There's no dot-com-type event on the horizon that could rescue our overextended asses. And yet, despite everything, hope persists for the rats in the cage.

Cartoon for January 8, 2009

What would get people to go back into stores? Indeed, shoplifting is up nationwide.

Chronicling the end of the empire is fun.

Behind the Rubric: THE BUSHIES

I've watched this new animation many times, and it still makes me laugh. I hope you like it as much as I do!

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Eat the Rich

Soak the Rich, Corporations

A moratorium on housing foreclosures and evictions is a good idea. So is making the tax code more progressive. Obama's plan to build new public works is smart. But those are half-measures. Even if they don't come out of Congress watered down and wankified, they'll come too little and too late to kill the rapidly metastasizing disease that threatens to kill the U.S. economy: income inequality.

Employers are shedding jobs at a breathtaking rate: more than 560,000 per month. The rate of job losses could soon hit a million. People who still have jobs are being squeezed by pay cuts and freezes; even those who have yet to be affected are closing their wallets out of fear that they'll be the next to get chopped. So consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, is plunging. Moreover, millions of individuals and businesses have lost access to credit and thus the movement of capital that might have pulled us out of this tailspin.

"The key is that the consumer is in the worst condition since the Great Depression," retail consultant Howard Davidowitz told NBC News. Boarded-up shops will abound. Experts expect 73,000 retail locations to close during the first few months of 2009. Between 20 and 40 percent of national retail chains will shut down. This isn't a recession. It's a depression, and it could destroy the country.

If broke consumers are the problem, shoveling money into their pockets is the way to get them spending again. Where do get it? The reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, he supposedly said, was because "that's where the money is." These days, the money is the hands of corporations and rich individuals.

(Warning: boring economic statistics and analysis follow. But stick with me. You could get a check!)

Tax returns give only a partial picture of a nation whose riches have been aggregated in the hands of a tiny elite. "The Internal Revenue Service," reported The New York Times in 2007, "captures only about 70 percent of business and investment income, most of which flows to upper-income individuals, because not everybody accurately reports such figures." So actual income inequality is bigger than IRS data indicates.

Even so, the IRS finds a huge pay gap between the very rich and the rest of us. "The wealthiest one percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005," the most recent year for which IRS data is available, according to a 2007 piece in The Wall Street Journal.

What if we played Karl Marx and left that one percent of the population (people who earn over $350,000 a year) with their fair share--one percent of national income? If we divided the rest of the loot equally, everyone else--99 percent--would get a 20.2 percent pay raise.

I don't know about you, but I could use it. And because I'm a patriot, I pledge to fritter away half of my 20.2 percent windfall on wine, women and frivolous American-made consumer goods.

What would happen if we adopted the communist principle of total income equality? That would require closing the gap between median (the halfway mark of income distribution) income and average income. Due to wage inequality, the average worker earns 40 percent more than the median. Close the gap, and two-thirds of Americans get a raise. One-third gets a cut. But only a small group, the top five or ten percent, would feel significantly pinched. Most of the third wouldn't lose much. And everyone would benefit from the increased economic activity that would result from equal income distribution.

Call it trickle-up economics.

Wouldn't socialism remove people's incentive to work hard? Though not a perfect economic model, the Soviet experience seems to disprove the idea that you can't find good CEO help for under a million bucks a year. Soviet physicists, athletes, filmmakers, novelists, composers and other innovators led their fields, yet were rewarded with little more than a medal and a puff piece in Pravda. Mikhail Kalishnikov invented the AK-47, the world's most popular firearm. He was never paid a dime, and never cared.

Here in the U.S., brilliant people become schoolteachers and priests. Salary isn't the biggest motivation for most people.

Another thing to bear in mind is an aspect of wealth Americans don't usually think about: assets. Eliminating income inequality wouldn't address asset inequality. The rich, who've had years of high income with which to save and invest, and have inherited assets from parents and grandparents who did the same, would still be rich. A truly efficient attempt to put more money in the average person's pocket would require redistribution of these accumulated assets.

If Willie Sutton were still around, however, he might find it easier to go after biggest 4000 U.S. corporations than its richest 40 million households. So let's look at big business income.

After-tax 2007 profits for U.S. corporations totaled $1.8 trillion, up 10 percent since 2001. (Bear in mind: this figure doesn't include CEO salaries, capital reinvestments, and the acquisition price of other corporations.) The effective average corporate tax rate in the U.S. is about 13 percent--one of the lowest in the industrialized world. If we were to double the effective tax rate to 26 percent, the U.S. would remain a tax haven compared to Germany and other major European countries.

Let's say the IRS took that extra 13 percent corporate profits tax and cut a check to the American people. Why not? Without us, the U.S. consumer, these companies wouldn't be in business. In 2007, every worker in the U.S. would have gotten a check for $12,000. That's a lot of xBoxes, not to mention mortgage payments.

There's plenty of cash left in the U.S. economy. Sooner or later, the tiny minority of corporations and rich individuals who are hoarding our nation's wealth will be forced to share it with the rest of us. The question is when, and how.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for January 5, 2009

Read to the tune of The Kinks' "Low Budget."

Cartoon for January 3, 2009

It's true: for the first time in memory, all three TV networks have pulled all of their full-time reporters out of active war zone: Iraq.

Coming Next Week: Another Animation!

Stay tooned.

Equal Time

posted by Susan Stark

One commenter on this blog stated that I should include an Israeli poem along with the Palestinian poem. I agree. Here it is:


To extinguish the fire,
To end the blockade,
To bring calm to all.


To recognize facts:
Hamas is a part of---
The Palestinian people.
No peace without it.


To stop playing at
“Divide and conquer”.
We are all in
The same boat.